And so there was lots of particulate matter,” Hatch said. “It was known that were operating without proper controls. to collect and analyze soil in the Pilsen neighborhood. In 2003, she and her students joined P.E.R.R.O.
Shelby Hatch, a chemist at Northwestern University, specializes in soil contamination. The adage goes that what goes up must come down, and this is where soil experts come into play. Kramer & Company puts the amount of lead emitted into the environment at a staggering 41,496 pounds over that same 10-year period.įor over a decade, Fisk Generating Station, another facility in Pilsen, has been pummeling the air with hundreds of thousands of pounds of barium, lead, manganese, hydrochloric acid and nine other dangerous compounds. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory facility report on H. Kramer & Company had been releasing an average of 2,544 pounds of lead into Pilsen from 1994 to 2003-this environmental injustice was the original push to form P.E.R.R.O. (Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization), the brass and bronze foundry H. Light and heavy industries along the industrial corridor have been leaking volatile particulates into the air for as long as there has been industry here.Īccording to P.E.R.R.O. Hilco Development issued an apology and fired a contractor, but for residents, it was only the latest in a vicious cycle. When Hilco contractors imploded the shuttered Crawford Station smokestack in April, Pilsen and Little Village residents were blanketed in a cloud of chemical particulates for days. Whether detected in the air at quadruple the national standard or enmeshed in the soil, countless missteps and degrees of negligence at the industry level have left these neighborhoods with a big, dangerous mess.
Lead and other heavy metals have laced everyday life in Pilsen and Little Village since the Industrial Revolution.
0 kommentar(er)
